Amusing ourselves since 2016

final fantasy

This week Elaine is joined by Scott to talk about State of Decay, the addictive game loops of The Division and Stardew Valley, the MEHness of Batman vs. Superman, flying spaceships with William Shatner’s voice guidance, a pricey Rock Band song package, console half steps, and so much more! Call in the next 10 minutes to double your order/receive free shipping/get a digital punch to the face! WARNING:BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN SPOILERS FROM 35:00 UNTIL 48:00. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED IF YOU CARE ABOUT THAT SORT OF THING.

It took a long time for me to convince myself, post-stomping, that going back to finish Final Fantasy III was a good idea. It was disheartening, to say the least, and I don’t think it was because I failed, but rather because I felt like I should have been able to succeed. There didn’t seem to be much of an indication that I was going to be in over my head until it was far too late for me to turn back, and because it is impossible to escape from that final stretch of six fights once you have begun, knowing what you’ll face at the very end basically has to be seen to be believed. It’s a sequence that is designed for you to fail it at least once, and I really don’t like that. Continue reading →

Remember how, some time ago, I mentioned that at some point I would probably suffer a catastrophic loss in battle that would cause me to say a lot of bad words and would require a Herculean effort to recover from? Yeah, that happened this week. Specifically, it happened three days ago when I sat down to attempt the final dungeon in Final Fantasy III.

Up until I marched into that fatal labyrinth, I actually thought I was doing pretty well. Wait; let me back up, because that’s not entirely true. I didn’t KNOW if I was doing well or not, but I suspected that I was. Continue reading →

I’ve put enough time into FFIII this week to make it to my third block of jobs (as with many job system-based games, particularly earlier ones, the jobs to which you have access are tied to specific story points; conveniently enough, in FFIII, it’s finding the elemental crystals which serve as magical MacGuffins in most of the early titles), and I’m still finding myself with not much in the way of strong feelings for the game one way or the other.

There are things I like, for sure: as I mentioned last week, the guest characters are handled much better (even if they have, at this point, basically been on a revolving-door system into my party), and there are actual, honest-to-goodness experience points tracking your progress rather than some seemingly-arbitrary measure of how tough your characters are based on how many times they’ve gotten thwacked with pointy sticks. The further I progress, though, the more I find things that bother me *just* a bit about the game. In general, they aren’t things that make me rage, contemplate giving up the game entirely, or question my devotion to this project; they’re simply…things I don’t really like. Continue reading →